Lightning Builds

Good afternoon, cannon fodders.

Are you a bored n00b? Maybe a Steam player with 200 prestige burning a hole in your pocket. Perhaps just a gamer discouraged by all the early resource plot grinding. Stop! Your rescue is at hand. Don't follow the lame construction advice from the GC muggles.

Figure 1: Congratulations. You are being rescued. Please do not resist.

Start Having Fun Today

This article describes how to use cotters and harvesting to drive growth on Day 1. I have written about the harvester playstyle before in How to Kill Your Way to Capturing a City. Today I will describe some fun city builds to do something useful and interesting in your first week or two, independent of whether you choose to capture your second city. Your overall goal is to establish enough population to develop one solid town and then 3-5 cotter towns to harvest on the map and supply that main city.

The basic cotter city build goes like this:

• Library
• Marketplace
• Storehouse
• Barracks
• Warehouse (optional)
• 17-18 Cottages
• Basic Resources as it amuses you

Depending on your particular strategy--Hunter, Maker, or Crafter--your second city will be a 5- or 7-food town that you settle or capture. The important concept is that you are funneling resources into a single excellent town, while enjoying all the activity of being a cotter kingpin. This single city is the foundation from which you can expand your account. The cotter towns are a great blank template once you decide your true account strategy.

Each cotter town adds a few levels of library, barracks, marketplace to keep the research queues moving foward. I recommend capping your resource plot growth at 12 to enable a painless exodus. The only buildings I'd carry to 20 is the Warehouse if you want to research exodus, the Barracks if you want to capture a city, and the Marketplace if you want to harvest the map and build more effectively (which you do).

The basic keeper city build goes like this:

• Library
• Marketplace
• Storehouse 15-18
• Barracks
• Warehouse
• 3-5 Farm 16-20
• Flourmill
• various buildings to reach 5000, 10000, or 20000 population

DO NOT JUST BUILD RANDOM BUILDINGS.

I cannot emphasize that enough. Some of the builds below require a focus on a particular type of building. If you need to fill in additional population to start another cotter town, I recommend looking at Common Ground, Blacksmith, Spearmaker, Consulate, Mage Tower, Fletcher, Forge, in that specific order. Where required, build the prerequisite buildings, but be prepared to tear them down if required.

The keeper city will cost prestige to build quickly, assuming you have sufficient basic resources. The more population you have, the more cotter towns you can support. Total city tiers are 5000 pop (4 cities), 10000 pop (5 cities), 20000 pop (6 cities). You can reach 5000 population in a day for less than 100 prestige, if you do it smart. That's your initial 25 prestige, plus $3 (75 prestige). Hitting 10000 will cost about 200 prestige ($8), and 20000 about 500 prestige ($15). This means a new Steam player with 200 prestige can be on track to hit 10000 population in a very short timeframe.

While the prestige part can be solved in 60 seconds with a credit card, the basic resource part of the equation is not. That's discussed again at the end of this article.

Teleport or Not?

Here's the deal. You really want to keep your teleport, in case you want to move your keeper city. However, in order to make the cotter growth strategy work, you need abundant herbs and minerals nearby to harvest. If your area of the N00b Ring has few herbs or minerals within 15-20 squares, then this strategy won't work well. You'd have to decide whether to abandon the account or use that precious teleport.

The Hunter

The hunter build works best with an orc. Orcish skinners cost only 5 Hides (other races cost 40 Hides), and you will want a lot of skinners to harvest valuable animal parts. Your keeper town is going to be a 7-food city. Skinner Guilds are high population buildings, and you will want at least 10. All guild buildings work best if you centralize them into a single city, since only one team can harvest a map location at one time. For big kills, a team of 250-400 skinners is the only way to go. Animal kills expire after 7 days, so anything you don't harvest quickly is lost.

Because the keeper city is a 7 food, and you start on a 5 food, you will need to either settle or capture the keeper city. It can't be your starter city unless you move it via exodus to a 7-food location.

Your income supplement will obviously come from killing animals, so be sure to read the Basic Hunting Guide, and then Killing Commanders for Fun and Profit. Your keeper and your cotter towns will all supply elite multi-commander hunting armies.

If you want to learn about hunting, then I recommend The Hunt Club [Hunt]. Freyja in particular is quite knowlegeable about hunting, animal spawn patterns, and farming animal kills. Many other alliances will welcome a dedicated hunter, but just beware of the advice you receive about hunting methods. There is a lot of ineffective advice out there.

The Maker

The maker build is easiest with a human, but it can work with any race. Your goal here is to produce a lot of a valuable item. The most useful builds would be the Brewer (beer), the Rancher (cows), and the Blacksmith (swords). I don't really recommend focusing on horses, bows, spears, chainmail, or plate armor. You might try to be a Bookbinder (books), as your library can produce lots of spare resource points.

Your keeper city will be on a 5/5/5/5/5 plot. This is a great build if you want to learn about production sovereignty. As you level up your resource plots and buildings, you will slowly edge up taxes so you can claim more sov. Level your resource plots evenly, as sovereignty consumes basic resources evenly. You will need to complete the appropriate sovereignty reserach trees for 20 sov squares, sov 3-5, and the item you are producing. The production building should be level 20, and your library should be higher levels as well.

You can produce a lot of a single advanced resource this way. Just be sure that you are selling your wares in Centrum fairly often, or you might become a target for thieves.

The Crafter

The crafter build is a more complex build, but one that can be fun for certain players. My recommendation on crafting towns is in descending order: spears (best), leather armor, chainmail armor, bows, swords, plate armor (worst). To understand why I chose this ordering, refer to Jagblade's Guide to Equipment.

Anticipate that most of your crafting will be by contract. It's more complicated to purchase raw materials and craft them into valuable items, but some players will embrace that challenge as well. There are several forum guides on how to arrange crafting towns. I recommend a 7-food city with 4 identical level 20 crafting buildings (to provide speed acceleration), plus one level 5 main production building (to actually craft the items). The level 5 is so you can't accidentally demolish it and lose 100M gold worth of crafted items in progress. The crafter build would work well with the hunter build, assuming you had two keeper cities, or a main/alt account focused on each role.

Who's Gonna Pay for All This?

As mentioned earlier, the basic resources are not trivial. The best way to get basic resources is to be a member of a large, active alliance that is willing to bombard you with resources. Alternately, you can trade your herbs, minerals, and hides in GC for loads of resources. Many people are willing to send resources if you promise them that you will prestige the caravans. Before you do that, understand that there is a right way to prestige accelerate caravans, and a wasteful way that will bankrupt your prestige for very little gain.

In the next article, we discuss how to get supplies into your account with the Layer Cake technique. If you do it right, you can do it once. After we get that powerful technique established, we will discuss some exciting PvP cotter kingpin builds, including the Tournament Fighter, the Shield Warrior, and the Gladiator.

Until then, as always...


Misbehave. Kill lots of stuff.

<^^^^^^^^||==O    Skint Jagblade